The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess

The first film I saw at the 23rd Vancouver International Film Festival in the fall of 2004 took me back to 2001, when I was called for jury duty and I asked a friend at the B.C. Supreme Court how to get out of it. Flirt with the defendant, she said. I didn’t do it and was sentenced to six weeks at the world’s most boring telecommunications fraud case. Every morning my jury shared a room with the glamorous jurors in the trial of Gillian Guess, the juror who slept with the defendant. Maybe that’s why I chose to see Bruce McDonald’s latest film, The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess, at the festival. In it, McDonald creates a heightened reality in which, for example, Guess appears on a surreal Vancouver Downtown Eastside talk show to defend her actions. Using different stocks and techniques, he produces fragments that indicate earlier periods of her life when she was more vulnerable, and to reflect sadness, naïveté and privation. After the screening, McDonald described Guess as a woman with a rich fantasy life, and this internal world is well captured on screen. Guess herself has moved to Thailand, where she hopes to shed her notoriety.